You need to get all your team members to work in the same direction. That is like the movie director, their job is to get all in the team into the same vision. And yes there are two ways, either by being nice or by fear.

If you don’t get the team in the same vision they will start losing interest in the whole thing. If you just tell them bad things and scream at them they won’t like your vision. If you are too nice you might lose power and they will suddenly bring in their own vision. So yes it’s a balance.

In the end, you have to have a sense of when and where you say stuff. I was working on a single release last year. The artist, as usual, was not that good on providing the assets I needed so I had to improvise to just make things happen. The assets were simple stuff, like the metadata to the song, a simple English bio, and a new press picture. Not really the hard stuff.

In the end, I had to write my own bio and had to find a picture online to have something to send to the press. It’s hard to just send a damn link with the song saying, this is a great song (yes we get those emails a lot from aspiring artists in the demo section). So I put out the first things and was really feeling I could get some results from it.

The suddenly the artist wrote a mess. The bio had a spelling error and a small info part was not correct. The picture was kind of old, he had a new hair color now!

And you just lost the feeling for this project. Nothing about, thank you for writing a whole bio from nothing and even have to find the information online. No, I got something wrong, a small thing which was not even important. Since the lazy artist didn’t provide a picture, of course, we will just take one. If you need the right picture, then for f*ck sake give the right info to us.

No, it was not fun to work with this single. The work I had done of course needed follow-up. But the taste in my mouth was not good. Suddenly it all felt boring and there was no joy of working with it. I just gave up and actually didn’t put any more job into it.

Of course, the release was as usual. I don’t think the artist ever knew that I just stopped. Of course, I did the basic stuff, like upload and send the press release that is needed. But to be honest that is just the basic. When a single really hits off it’s because you go that extra mile. In fact, you need the whole team to go that extra mile. The artist killed my feeling to go that extra mile. I stopped doing the extra emails that are personal to friends in good positions that can make a difference. I stopped coming up with smart things around the release. In the end, the single went nowhere. Like it said many times the doors in this business is closing very silent.